Graphics Card Upgrade - Suggestions?

June 18th, 2013, 11:05

Originally Posted by Drithius
Generally speaking, putting your OS and a suite of your most commonly used applications (Photoshop, Office, etc) on an SSD is the most noticeable improvement you can make for a typical PC. Typically not worthwhile for gaming however.

Indeed, most games load a lot of assets into memory for performance, reducing the need for a fast hard drive.

It is true that if you are on a budget and play games at their default settings an ssd is not a really cost effective upgrade other than in the sense that I pointed out (heavily modded/tweaked games that display stuttering and increased loading times).

Most new games are designed with consoles in mind these days, so they need to be light on the loading department (that is only a good thing btw)…

A good Graphics card is a much more logical investment.

That said, a good middle ground solution would be buying a small (128 GB) ssd for a system drive as Drithius pointed out and perhaps buy a second HDD drive (identical to the one you have now) and RAID0 it for a games etc drive. Do note that raid0 is less safe than a single drive theoretically so back up your sensitive data if you have them. There will be even enough space left on the ssd in case a particulare game is getting on your nerves loading/stutter wise and you need to move it there for a spell.

All the reviews I've seen for it are very positive. It comes with a respectable factory overclock and has a custom cooling solution.

It should be interesting to see how much of a performance increase I get from this. I usually skip one generation when I buy a new graphics card, but in this instance I held out and skipped both the 500 and 600 series.

I am really interested in your results. Currently I am on GTX460 and thinking of going to GTX 770 or even push it to GTX 780.

I would like to know what kind of performance increase you are getting and how hot the new card run.

Apparently its better to buy "generic" GTX 770 with Titan cooler rather than branded card with non Titan cooler. Titian coolers are supposed to be lot better since they push the heat out of chassis.

Originally Posted by lostforever
Apparently its better to buy "generic" GTX 770 with Titan cooler rather than branded card with non Titan cooler. Titian coolers are supposed to be lot better since they push the heat out of chassis.

I'm not sure if that's true, but I doubt you'll find a reference card for sale anyways. Afaik, those were just for review purposes.

Thanks for the information on SSD's everyone. From the feedback you guys have given, I think I will avoid them for now and focus on some ram and a new graphics card. The problem is that I always drive myself crazy when making a purchase like this - i.e., "will I pick the right one? Will I regret it later when the prices go down for the next level of cards? If I wait a little while, will it go on sale?" That sort of thing. I need to learn how to live "in the moment" a bit more and just pull the trigger. I clearly get a lot of enjoyment from my PC, so I should just bite the bullet, dammit!

Still leaning towards the XFX 7870 by the way. Will probably (hopefully) make a final decision soon and order it.

My SSD has been pretty handy when playing zone-based MMOs. You can pop from zone to zone mighty fast and sometimes you are in a BIG hurry in those games.

They do help with single player games, too - you can tell by the way you never get to read the loading screen tips! When you add it up, though, you're only saving a couple of minutes tops on a forty hour game. I have yet to see a single player game where I'm in a big rush.

Originally Posted by JonNik
Another vote for the Windforce series. Had the GTX 670 for a year now (or whatever its been since it first came out). Relatively silent and a great performer (as a heavily modded Skyrim, Witcher 2 and MEtro last light aptlydemonstrate). Very satisfied.

I received my Windforce GTX 770 today. This thing is massive.. definitely the largest single-GPU card I've owned, and it's heavy as a brick. Very sturdily built as well.

Originally Posted by Nerevarine
Anyone have thoughts on solid-state drives? Do they really provide much of a noticeable performance boost? I've read different views on the subject, and I have no experience with SSD's myself.

Definitely noticeable.

According to some benchmarks I ran it can be +160% faster than my old drive in some cases, but what I see with my own eyes in real world scenarios is more like +40% faster. Which is fantastic. (it's an old Crucial m4, btw)

Lesser bonus is it makes no sound. And I suppose that's because it has less parts like ball-bearings grinding together wearing out.

When you boot windows 7 64bit its finished loading just before the windows icon stops its animation, if that helps picture it at all.

Originally Posted by joxer
Yea, but currently it's a luxury too expensive for the benefit it adds.

As others have said -and I more than agree- going from a SSD-less system to a SSD-powered system is the most significant tangible upgrade you can make nowadays.
You have a very immediate and very noticeable benefit so I would not call it a luxury at all but pretty much a must-have, especially since prices have come way down.
You can easily get a 256GB drive in the quite affordable €150 range and while you may not be able to slap your entire 500+ games Steam library on a drive like that, it is more than large enough to install Windows, your most frequently used programs and about a dozen of your favorite games.
Trust me. Once you have experienced da power of da SSD, you're never going to want to go back to a HDD for your OS/productivity/gaming drive ever again .

Originally Posted by GothicGothicness
Regarding SSD as people already said, for overall PC speed, there is no upgrade that comes anywhere close, you'll notice a huge difference!

For games, only loading times will be affected.

That depends on the games and how completely assets are loaded into memory (or how completely they are even capable of trying.) You are absolutely right about the vast majority of games, but some games which have a highly extensible asset library (read - highly modable) might benefit greatly during gameplay.

Specifically, SSDs are credited with greatly boosting performance in games like Skyrim and The Sims 3. Generally performance could be expected to be improved in games which both load during play and for which the range of assets to be loaded is expected to be quite flexible. In Skyrim this mostly manifests as smoother performance when moving quickly - new cells are preloaded much more quickly. It is also going to be most pronounced when using either significant mods particularly texture packs and/or tweaked view and pre-load distances (ugrids setting).

Of course this benefit, aside from load times, will likely shrink on upcoming cross-platform games optimized for the new consoles and on PC exclusive titles. That is, the in-game advantages of SSDs might become less noticeable even in games which perform this sort of loading as it becomes more standard for them to provide x64 binaries (instead of just large address aware) and be optimized across available platforms to expect more than 4gb of RAM.

Originally Posted by Moriendor
You can easily get a 256GB drive in the quite affordable €150 range and while you may not be able to slap your entire 500+ games Steam library on a drive like that, it is more than large enough to install Windows, your most frequently used programs and about a dozen of your favorite games.

Still a way too expensive.
I do have external HDDs for backups and of course I'd never keep backups on SSD. Not because I don't care for instaloads but because external HDDs are utterly cheap to buy.

DArtagnan

JDR: I haven't pulled the trigger on a card just yet - and it appears that my indecisiveness might have paid off (at least this time, anyway). The GTX 760 seems really good for a mid-high card, and it should fit my needs perfectly right now given the rest of my setup. I think I might just go ahead and grab it - it's certainly moved ahead of the Radeon 7870 for me. Thanks for the heads-up JDR!